Many of you will have noticed we’ve been having trouble keeping the Zooniverse up this morning. Like a lot of the internet, we host our sites on Amazon Web Services, who are having serious problems at their North Virginia data center. Using cloud hosting allows us to do many amazing things – primarily produce sites that automatically spin up new servers when we’re busy (like last week, when Planet Hunters hit the top of www.time.com – but in this case it’s bitten us rather.

All of the other Amazon data centers seem fine, and the team are currently busily moving us to California, but it’s taking us some time. In the long run, we’ll see what we can do to protect ourselves from single data center outages; we can’t afford to host in many places just in case, but maybe we should sprinkle the projects around a little more so there’s always something up.

Please bear with us, and rest assured that your hard work in the form of classifications is backed up and secure.